Foreclosure Nation

During the 2010 REALTORS® Conference & Expo in New Orleans, NAR asked the members of its 12 policy-making committees to identify and rank the top federal policy issues which they believed would be of critical importance to the real estate industry in 2011. The committees reported to the Public P...

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The still-fragile economy and fresh tax cuts approved by Congress last month will drive the federal deficit to nearly $1.5 trillion this year, the biggest budget gap in U.S. history, congressional budget analysts said Wednesday. The grim forecast from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office ca...

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President Obama sought to rouse the nation from complacency in his State of the Union address Tuesday, urging innovation and budget reforms that he said are vital to keep the United States a leader in an increasingly competitive world. "Sustaining the American dream has never been about standing p...

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Many economists believe that the great recession resulted from a “perfect storm” of various factors that were not too serious individually, but when combined they interacted in ways that created a crisis that was larger than the sum of the contributing causes. Something similar is developing with th...

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The Obama administration is likely to miss a deadline for issuing a long-awaited report about the future of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and what might replace them. The Dodd-Frank law enacted last year to overhaul financial-industry regulations didn't address how to reshape the trou...

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In a magazine piece previewed in today's New York Times, Peter Baker drops thousands and thousands of words concerning the White House's effort to do something about the terrible economy and its attendant massive unemployment crisis. The "path from crisis to anemic recovery," Baker says, "was marked...

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Today we see how utterly mistaken was the Milton Friedman notion that a market system can regulate itself. We see how silly the Ronald Reagan slogan was that government is the problem, not the solution . . . I wish Friedman were still alive so he could witness how his extremism led to the defeat of ...

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Congress' passage of temporary funding in lieu of a budget for the year leaves many agencies unable to proceed with projects, including those to help the needy, the elderly and AIDS patients. Congress' failure to pass a massive spending bill — opting instead to fund the government with a temporary ...

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WASHINGTON — The Obama administration warned Congress on Thursday that the government would reach its legal borrowing limit as early as the end of March and no later than May 16 and urged House and Senate leaders to move quickly to raise the debt ceiling to avoid an unprecedented default. The Trea...

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Members of the 112th Congress were sworn in just days ago, and already lawmakers are making big waves. Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Republican from the state of Minnesota in her third term, introduced legislation Thursday that would repeal the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill that was signed into law ju...

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WASHINGTON — In its latest move to help the economy, the Federal Reserve is about to restart its monetary printing press — or rather, the electronic equivalent. The Fed announced Wednesday that it intended to buy $600 billion in Treasury securities through June. It also signaled that it could make...

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A little-known Fed mechanism — referred to as the interest rate on excess reserves — essentially gives the Fed leverage over $1.1 trillion in bank deposits. Most of those deposits were created as the Fed gobbled up mortgage-backed securities and Treasury notes and bonds during the financial crisi...

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THE PRESIDENT'S AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT PLAN With each passing day, families across America are watching their bills pile up and their savings disappear. President Obama believes that if we do not act quickly, this recession could linger for years – and America could lose the competit...

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Agency for International Development (USAID) Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) Department of Agriculture (USDA) Department of Commerce (DOC) Department of Defense (DOD) Department of Education (ED) Department of Energy (DOE) Department of Health and Human Services (HH...

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